


I am glad, I am glad, that my friends don’t know what I think

by middlemarch



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Doctors & Physicians, F/M, Gareth Mallory is outnumbered, Love Triangles, Romance, Vivian's grandmother, former lover, literally 4 OFC now, not a threesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-20
Updated: 2018-02-20
Packaged: 2019-03-21 13:26:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13741866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: It shouldn't have been a surprise.





	I am glad, I am glad, that my friends don’t know what I think

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tessaquayle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tessaquayle/gifts).



“Why didn’t you tell me who she is?” Vivian said, very calmly. She’d learned it was better to sound calm in these discussions, that the other person, a man usually, expected her to hiss or shriek and was taken aback when she embodied his idea of perfect rationality.

“Who she is, was rather, isn’t important,” Gareth replied. He didn’t have many tells and she expected he did well at poker, but she knew him better than most. There was an extra half-second before he blinked and a tightening in his jaw; she’d traced those eyelids with her finger, licked the sweat from his jaw. She only cared about his reason—what he’d thought of her reaction, what he wanted to prevent…or encourage.

“That’s it, then?” she said. If he didn’t have more to say, she’d break it off. The intensity of their connection was unusual, breath-taking, but it did not have a history she could not bear to lose. She was a surgeon trained and she knew how and when a cut was, if not kindest, then warranted.

“I didn’t want you to worry,” he said. He made it sound as if he was admitting something he was ashamed of. Another woman might have been taken in.

“No,” she said. She could feel the height of her heels all the way up her hamstrings. She could taste the bourbon she’d wisely picked up in the duty-free before she left, hear Amy’s voice and her grandmother’s, one sputtering, the other dry, not patient but done with impatience.

“No?” he repeated, finally sounding confused. Curious too. Finally sounding like a man she was willing to go through this fucking ( _bloody_ ) nonsense for.

“That’s not it. Try again. It’s late, Gareth. Get it right this time.”

There was a silence, longer than she was supposed to like. He still couldn’t resist seeing if he could make her talk first. She imagined the look on Nina’s face, a look she knew she would recognize. _Oh darling, yes, all the time, whenever he thought he could get away with it_ she might say or just _Not as often as the others and his manners are so very fine_.

“I don’t like mess. I don’t like having to clean up. I didn’t want a scene, even the prospect of a scene,” he said. He was a gambler, then, played even if he couldn’t be sure of winning. The world was big and, she found, extremely small when it counted. It would have been nothing, an affair with a diplomat, the former wife of an MP, a detail she might have enjoyed except that he made it something. He deceived himself with his talk of purity and discretion; he wanted the chance of the encounter, the two women eyeing each other. A rivalry, even, preferably unspoken, and a sizing up of similarities—cheekbones, a full lower lip, narrow shoulders in a silk blouse. Primitive and that’s what he wanted and couldn’t admit.

“I don’t remember much from my psychiatry rotation in medical school, you know. It was a long time ago. They let us take a long lunch, that was nice. Refreshing. But there was one psychiatrist, old, he wore a three piece suit every day and long hair like Beethoven, probably to fulfil everyone’s fantasy of what a psychiatrist was,” she said, letting herself talk. Seeing if he would interrupt. _Good boy_ , she wanted to say when he didn’t, _this might work_.

“There’s no negative in the unconscious, he said. I always liked it. It felt true. I think you wanted a scene, you wanted me to scream or cry or for Nina to slap me, or whatever you thought we might do,” she said.

“Maybe,” he replied and it was as good as a confession. _Men_ , Amy might say, rolling her eyes extra-hard in her perfect embodiment of a 90s gal-pal. _A man_ , her grandmother would have murmured, adjusting the fold of the silk scarf around her neck, untroubled.

“The next time, introduce us and then leave. There will certainly be someone else for you to talk to,” she instructed, pleased when his eyes didn’t widen.

“All right. If that’s what you want.”

“Yes. You don’t know me, you don’t know what I want—and that’s okay,” she said. It would be nice if he made a lucky guess, she couldn’t help thinking. “What’s not okay is not asking. Deciding for me. And for Nina.”

“You’re right. I see that now,” he said, moving closer. He was near enough to put his arms around her but he looked down and waited for her to nod first. No matter what he imagined, she’d never ask Nina about this. She didn’t need to—it couldn’t have been the same.

“As you should,” she replied, letting it mean many things, stepping closer but not kissing him. That would be later, when Nina would not be in the bed with them, not even observing from the doorway as he took her against the wall, her heels thrown half-way across the room, her stocking feet pressed against his thighs. Now she held him and he held her, learning who she was, who she would be.

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a picture on Tumblr and a chat with tessaquayle about what I could and couldn't imagine writing...and dawdling on my Mercy Street story.
> 
> Title is from Stevie Smith's "In My Dreams."


End file.
